Scott Brown: A summer intern did it

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) says the accusations of plagiarism on his official Senate website were “getting a little silly” and blamed a summer intern for the mess, The Boston Globe reports.

“It was a summer intern that put together the site, we corrected it once we found out, and we’re working on trade agreements and jobs,” the senator said Thursday.

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The Massachusetts Republican landed in a sticky situation this week when it was reported that some of the language used on his Senate website was lifted verbatim off of former Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s site.

A spokesman for Brown told the Globe, which first reported the story late Wednesday, that the content in question was “inadvertently transferred without being rewritten,” adding that it was a “staff level oversight which we regret and is being corrected.”

Brown on Thursday said the intern who made the error had “very little time and resources to put things up.”

“We were notified of it, we fixed it — end of story,” he told the Globe.

But Democrats are pushing back on Brown’s story, accusing the senator of being disingenuous by using a summer intern as the scapegoat, saying the senator was unlikely to have had any summer interns when his website was created.

Marcie Kinzel, a spokeswoman for Brown, told Reuters on Thursday that the senator’s website hasn’t been updated since around Feb. 2010 when her boss took office.

One Democratic source told POLITICO that this timeline clearly doesn’t match up with the senator’s claims, since February would have been “well before any ‘summer intern’ would have been onboard.”

“It seems Sen. Brown’s office is so busy trying to cover their tracks that they forgot to get their story straight before talking to the press,” the source said.

Kevin Franck, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said it’s “hard to believe” that a summer intern would have been responsible for parts of the website that Brown’s office says was launched in February.

Former North Carolina Sen. Dole’s former chief of staff Brian Nick told POLITICO on Thursday that Dole’s office was “certainly aware that Sen. Brown’s office used our site as a template during the transition period,” dismissing the publicity surrounding the incident as “much ado about nothing.”